With the first reported case of Ebola in the United States now a cause for alarm (at least among the teevee news anchors), the only thing one wishes about the first presentation of UC Irvine Physical Sciences' annual Breakfast Lecture Series is that it was sooner. Dr. Aaron Esser-Kahn is scheduled to discuss innovative vaccine approaches to combat diseases like Ebola on Tuesday.

UC Irvine chemist Esser-Kahn's talk on "The Tricks and Treats of Vaccine Design" is one of those "on one hand ... on the other hand" propositions. The way current vaccine approaches have led to the greatest era of human health in the history of civilization will be discussed. But so will the fact that scientists are still struggling to develop vaccines against diseases like malaria, HIV and, yes, Ebola.

Esser-Kahn will also share details on a personal mission to help create vaccines to combat deadly diseases and to make current vaccines safer and more effective for all ages.

The lecture, which is free and open to the public, runs from 7:30-9 a.m. Tuesday, Oct. 7, in the UCI Student Center's Pacific Ballroom. RSVP at ps.uci.edu/bls and make sure to scope out where you are going to park on a campus map beforehand.

Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before "graduating" to OC Weekly in 1995 as the paper's first calendar editor. He has contributed as a freelance editor and writer to several publications and been the subject of or featured in several reports online, in print and on the radio and television. One of countless times he returned to his Costa Mesa, CA, home with a bounty of awards from a journalism competition, his wife told him to take out the trash.